China ranks Ethereum, EOS and Tron way above Bitcoin

China’s Center for Information and Industry Development (CCID) has published its latest cryptocurrency rankings. Top of the list? EOS, which takes the top spot for the second time. Ethereum came in a close second and Tron—despite its recent woes and controversies—was right behind in third place. But where was Bitcoin, the number one ranked cryptocurrency by market cap? It didn't even break the top ten.

According to the ratings, Bitcoin came in at 11th place, with 103 points–by comparison, EOS scored 153.1 points.. But how did the CCID reach this startling conclusion? Well, projects are evaluated based on their basic technology, applicability, and creativity in a similar way to Weiss measures projects. But whereas Weiss gave Bitcoin an A for its efforts, the Chinese Center took a less flattering view.

Bitcoin's development is relatively slow—when compared to sharding-first blockchain Zilliqa or wild social media experiments like Steem (which ranked fourth in the list). But, many would argue that's a good thing. Its development is kept slow to ensure that it continues doing what it does best: Keeping an accurate record of transactions. And unlike other projects, like Zcash and XRP, it doesn't have a single company working on it. Rather, it has an entire ecosystem of developers slowly plugging away at it.

Talking of XRP, it was even lower down the list, ranked 17, despite it being the third-ranked cryptocurrency by market cap. This, some feel, is down to geopolitics and the current trade war between the United States and China. The XRP ledger is largely coded and updated by Ripple, a company based in San Francisco, whereas the rankings are sponsored by the Chinese government—which some believe may be using the rankings to score points against US-based companies. EOS is based in the Cayman Islands and Ethereum calls Switzerland home. Bitcoin isn't based anywhere officially, so these ratings should be taken with a pinch of salt.

But it wasn't all bad, upcoming crypto projects Cosmos and Zilliqa have emerged as projects to watch, appearing on the rating list for the very first time.